Trying to move photos from digital to old fashioned, hand held

I like picasa from google - you can itemize the pictures and put in different
albums and it has a huge capacity. Most importantly: it's free!!

CJane, so you don't vote for the physical album?

No not really. Isn't it easier to just send the pictures from the online album
vs. a physical one you either have to drag around or show when people visit
you. You always can print out the pictures that are dear to you.

<sigh>

In theory, I decided on a plan of action for my pictures that goes something like this:

1. Procrastinate about the whole organizing business for an unspecified amount of time.
   
2. When done procrastinating, dump all photos into one, chronologically-sorted monster-album.
   
3. Procrastinate some more.
   
4. When overwhelmed by the urge to create even more order, tag the photos with keywords like "family", "vacation", "New Mexico", and so forth. (Photobucket, my main photo dumping location, lets you tag your photos.) That way, clicking on the tags gives you a categorized album.)

In practice I'm stuck in step #1. In fact, I have hundreds of pictures from the 90s still in the envelopes they left the drug store in. I avoid looking at them because they make me feel guilty. But I still think my theoretical plan of action is sound.

PS: I vote for the online album, albeit with a heavy heart. I like to handle physical albums together with others, too. But in the real world that never happens, my family and friends being sprinkled all across the globe. Your mileage may vary.

<double sigh>

I do physical prints little k, even though they don't really end up in albums.

BUT the lab I use allows me to organize my photos into albums. I albumize things there and they are sorted by "album" when they arrive at my house.

You can move things from album to album until you find what fits -- I guess it's a virtual organization that ends up being a physical organization.

For snapshots (family, friends, pets) and that sort of thing I organize chronologically.

I have a "main" album which is really all my "keepers" -- the things I have printed to hang on my walls, etc.

I have "portraits" that is work I've done for other people.

I have a "Mo" album which are the photos I really like of Mo -- one's I've worked on instead of snapshots.

You can even have the same photo in multiple albums and the lab stores all of it for you for free. You just click on what you want to order, run through a list of options and presto! they show up at your door.

Periodically I'll have them burn my "main" album to a disc so that I can archive those photos at home.

I'm not a fan of on-line albums.

Even if you want physical albums I still recommend keeping your "master copy" of your collection digital. It's easier to safeguard and you can develop new physical copies whenever you need to.

That was one of the treasures I received after my dad passed away. I got all his photo albums he'd collected since he moved out of state and remarried; about 20 of them in total.

I liked the way my dad had his albums organized. He had one album for each year, sometimes it took two or three albums for some years. Within each album they were arranged chronologically so you could see the year progress from holiday to holiday and vacation to vacation. Each series of photos was labeled with the dates, location and occasion. I was able to relive some of his happiest years in those photos, many I'd not ever seen before.

For my own photos, I keep paper copies and then scan them to my computer and back them up in a couple of different online albums so I'll never lose them if there is a fire or some other disaster.

Oh! I absolutely keep my digital pics in files on my hard drive which I back up to an external drive.

I can print good 4X6 images here at home.

I think I'll separate family from friends and nature/landscape/etc shots - 3 albums. And I'll only print a few keepers.

I have chronological albums of my own and my family's life. They're quite thick and need culling, probably severe. I have albums of my landscape design projects, albums of photos I took as "design interest", and several albums on italy (whereas most of my mexico or california travel photos are in the main chronology). I've had some photos enlarged and framed them, my favorite being ruined on this last move and due for my finding the neg and getting another enlargement.

I'll take Robert's advice and digitize what I keep of all these when I'm doing this "severe culling".

I've been considering flickr and picasa - I had a thread asking about all this at one point a year or two ago. Will link that when I find it, as several folks replied.

Given the digitizing, I will move more in the direction of subject "albums". First of all, as you get older, you might be surprised by the general lack of interest that others in daily life have in one's photos, though this is an obvious natural development and doesn't mean they don't care about you. When I was in my twenties and probably in my thirties, a lot of people had an album laying about on a coffee table. In my sixties with thousands of photos, who cares? I don't say that petulantly, it's just true that life conversations go in a different direction. Family still sends around photos of grandchildren and photos of the new house, but the avidity for keeping up on photos that we had in my youth has dissipated. Some avidity lingers, an example being how many of us on a2k get a big kick about other a2kers photos.

On the other hand, re diminishing avidity for photo albums in daily life, people online and realtime friends and even people you don't know yet online may be interested in photos on different subjects. Like you, littlek, I've got a lot of architecture photos. Also urban scenes, many landscapes, even (what a surprise) some photos of food. Given the copyability of digital photos, some can go into more than one category, a problem that has plagued me a bit with my regular old photos.